Interviews

Valve's Gabe Newell on Left 4 Dead

Gabe Newell, cont.:The Director will also use visual cues. When things are getting bad, you'll notice that the colors are pulled out of the world, it desaturates the screen, and it'll also lower the lighting level. That will stress you out, and make it harder for you to see. The Director is using those tricks, and we found it very useful to look to the language of cinema for ideas about how to create that shared experience.

But it has to be done procedurally, because you don't know what the individual players are going to do. They're four actors in a horror movie, and none of them have a copy of the script. So the world and the Director have to adapt to what it is that they're doing. While we were playing, you could get a sense for some of the decisions that the Director was making.

GameSpy: Do you have multiple play mode options?

Gabe Newell: You can play as a single player, or as a player with other friends on the same side. We also have a versus mode where people can take on the roles of the zombies and play against the humans.

[While listening to Gabe explain things, we've been idling, and our character suddenly looked up and began the zombie hunt of his own accord.]

Gabe Newell: In this case, it's decided that you're not controlling your character anymore, so the AI has decided to take over your character and start playing for you. So you can enter and exit, go make a sandwich, and your friends can keep playing, and when you get back you can pick up and keep on going. Or you can have nobody play in the game, and the game will play itself, and you can just watch it.

GameSpy: So you mentioned combining the multiplayer gameplay with the story-driven aspects of a single-player game. What's the deal with Left 4 Dead's story?

Gabe Newell: What we've been going through here, there are four main areas, four main campaigns that tend to follow a progression that we think of as movie-like. We've been going through a set of urban environments, trying to get to a hospital, and battling our way through the hospital to get on top, where there's a big showdown. The goal is to survive long enough for a helicopter to rescue us. Then, of course, in horror movie fashion, the helicopter crashes, thus beginning the next campaign. They're a series of movie-length campaigns.

GameSpy: What can shooter fans expect from Left 4 Dead, tactically?

Gabe Newell: Anyone who's played Counter-Strike before will be familiar with the weapons and the equipment. You have a variety of weapon choices that you can select. It's very important for a team to be balanced. One team member, for example, may handle long-range threats, but they can easily be overwhelmed. So it's important to have somebody else with a different short-range weapon. If everybody picks the same weapon, your team is going to be very unbalanced, so you really want your people to have a mix of weapons.

It's also important to heal the other members of your team and to keep your health up. There are a variety of grenades that you can use that have different effects. Some are area-denial, like the Molotov, while others are meant to help you if you're being swarmed, like the pipe bomb. It makes a beeping noise, and any kind of repeating mechanical noise is a signal to the infected to attack that area. It's a good way of drawing the infected away. If one of your teammates is down, and needs to be revived, you can throw the pipebomb to draw the infected away temporarily so you can get that player to their feet.

GameSpy: Do you miss out by not focusing on kill-death ratios, or your place on a scoreboard?

Gabe Newell: When we went into the safehouse, we put up a bunch of information about who had the most headshots, who rescued people the most, the game tracks all of this information about how each person is doing, and that becomes part of your profile.

When you're doing matchmaking, it's really useful to have information like this. When you look at a player, and see that they get a lot of headshots, but never heal anybody, then you know that they're basically all offense. You can say that's great, or you can say that you're more interested in someone that has a more balanced game, knowing that they'll be helping you out instead of just running around shooting everything, because you'll have more fun that way.

GameSpy: You said that the game is split into four campaigns. Are you planning for future downloadable campaigns?

Gabe Newell: Very much so. We're right in this transition. In the pre-Internet world you can only think of what you were offering customers as a box. You put everything into it, and thought of it as a one-time release. Now, customers want an ongoing entertainment service. So with Team Fortress 2, our product that's furthest along in terms of doing that, we found that the best way to get new customers was to get excited existing customers.

And the best way to do that was to release new maps, new weapons, add achievements. They're really interested in the characters and the story behind them. Every four to six weeks we've released movies about the characters. We just released a movie about the sandwich, which actually people have really enjoyed. We still need to release these boxes, these point releases, but as we continue to release new campaigns, new characters, new weapons, and tell stories about these characters, that's the best way to grow the community.

A lot of the value of a game like Left 4 Dead or a game like Team Fortress 2 is the community around it, since those are the people that you get to play with, and that's where you're deriving a lot of your enjoyment. So we're taking the same approach that we've taken with Team Fortress 2, and doing that for Left 4 Dead.

GameSpy: It looks like our session is up. It was fun! Thanks for your time.